Low fund absorption hampers road maintenance
Mr Michael Odongo, the URF executive director.
What you need to know:
According to the sector performance 2016, the road network condition performance of national roads was at 78.5 per cent and 59 per cent for district roads
Kampala.
Uganda Road Fund (URF) has raised concerns over poor fund absorption among agencies tasked with road maintenance.
The key concern of URF is the huge inter-quarter roll-over of funds by agencies, sometimes as high as 50 per cent of net funds available and high return rate to the treasury at the close of the financial year.
Speaking at the National Road Maintenance Workshop on Wednesday in Kampala, URF executive director Michael Odongo said failure to utilise disbursed funds among agencies is fuelled by capacity challenges.
“The money is rolled over and it goes back to the treasury because they are not able to absorb it in quick time. This is because of capacity problems, the equipment is inadequate and they do not have trained manpower,” Mr Odongo said.
Another key concern was inadequate funding to ensure efficient road maintenance. Every local government is allocated funds depending on the kilometres of roads covered and size of the district.
“If you look at that big network and what is supposed to be done on the roads, that money is not enough. There are areas with peculiarities, the mountainous areas like Kigezi, these need more funding and the formula for allocation does not consider them,” said Mr Dunstan Balaba, the chairperson of chief administrative officers in Uganda.
Important to note is that the number of agencies has gone up as municipalities have grown from 22 to 41 yet the budget remains constant. URF has to strip the same budget to cater for all municipalities.
The size of known public roads asset is 80,000km and these had a replacement value of about Shs14.4 trillion in 2012.
Roads are managed by agencies designated by URF such as Uganda National Roads Authority, Kampala Capital City Authority, districts, urban municipalities and town councils.
According to the sector performance 2016, the road network condition performance of national roads was at 78.5 per cent and 59 per cent for district roads.
URF receives about Shs420b every financial year but it believes a budgetary allocation of up to Shs700b every year would go a long way in improving absorption capacity.
